Hi,

 

I bought a couple of matching 8GB sticks of RAM to go from 16GB to 32GB on my server.  I hadn't cleaned the system out in over a year so I took the opportunity to go at it with a hoover and dusting brush.  After I was finished, it booted with disk1 in the array being disabled with a red x in the status icon.  All the other drives appeared to be OK with green dots saying they were detected...initially!  Then all of a sudden they all turned grey - which I assume meant they were not only "disabled", but they weren't being detected at all any more.

 

I rebooted and tried again and the same thing with the disk1 drive being disabled and and others showing as OK...and it appeared they stayed OK.  I started looking for how to resolve the disabled disk - and found a post saying to take the drive out the array, start in maintenance mode, stop array, then start array again and it should rebuild.  So that is what I did...and at first I thought it was doing it - it said it was rebuilding the array...but all of a sudden the drives were all grey, and the number of errors on all the other drives except disk1 were going up like crazy with zero read/writes on any drive...yet it claimed it was rebuilding at 600-700mb/s? I've never had to do a rebuild so I wasn't sure what was happening but nothing seemed right so I stopped it.

 

I then stopped the array and all the drives in the array now had red x's next to them and they were no longer selected from the drop down list.

 

All the 4 of the affected drives are connected to an LSI HBA using a 4-port breakout cable.  There are a couple other drives in there connected through the SATA ports on the motherboard and they seemed fine.

 

I shutdown the system again and took the HBA and reseated it.  I took it out when I cleaned the system so maybe it wasn't seated properly in the PCIE slot?!  I also reseated all the RAM sticks as I thought maybe the 2 new sticks that I had put in hadn't seated properly (I also took out one of the originals just to check the label to be 100% sure they were matching sticks).   The next thing I would have tried would be removing the 2 new sticks of RAM as perhaps they were faulty and causing errors with the HBA.

 

I fired up the system again and thankfully, this time things seemed better.  All the drives were showing up - disk1 had an orange exclamation next to it saying contents are being emulated...but it was better than the red X.  I started the array again and...again, thankfully...the array started rebuilding disk1...and all the metrics are what I would expected - all the other drives are being read at 250mb/s and disk1 is being written to at the same speed - all with zero errors...so I think whatever it was is fixed?  I think if I had shut down and reseated things before messing with removing the drive from the array and starting in maintenance mode, I would have avoided this?  But if a 10 hour rebuild resolves things that I will take that as a win and consider it a lesson learnt.

 

So, what do you guys think?  Appreciate your time!  And pray for me that the rebuild completes without issue and there are no more problems 😂

Could have been a controller issue, did you save the diagnostics before rebooting? In any case, if it happens again, save and post the diags.